Swimming: Flying Swan gets the nod

MELBOURNE - 'Project Corney' appears back on track.

Despairing after a lacklustre world championship at Montreal last year, Corney Swanepoel underwent a series of tests and technique changes to push him back into the world's elite sprint flyers.

But struggling with a slightly amended swimming stroke, Swanepoel failed to qualify for his specialist 100m fly at the nationals and had to rely on the benevolence of the selectors, who granted him passage to Melbourne via a medley relay team.

Under swimming rules, that meant Swanepoel, 20, could also enter individual events and will race the 50m and 100m fly, as well as pushing Moss Burmester for the fly leg of the 4x100 medley relay team.

It's been a relatively traumatic couple of years for the talented South African exile, who was showing the sort of form in the lead-up to the Athens Olympics to suggest he would very soon be among the world's best swimmers.

Illness and a loss of form has delayed that progress but there is hope the corner has been turned.

Swanepoel has spent the past week at Geelong doing speed work with coach Thomas Ansorg and said he is feeling "good and rested".

"The taper has been good to me," he said, referring to the process where the swimmers come off the big kilometres they have built up in training to focus on speed.

Swanepoel, who was found to have undergone a growth spurt that affected his technique around the time of last year's world champs, doesn't want to get ahead of himself in Melbourne in terms of talking up his chances of getting a medal.

"I'm just thinking about how I'm going to race and not worry about the other stuff.

"In the past I might have said I wasn't thinking about making finals and winning medals but in the back of my mind I probably was.

"It's quite hard to switch that off sometimes."

Swanepoel will begin with the splash and dash of the 50m fly on Friday. Truth be told, Swanepoel prefers the 100m, calling the 50m "an old man's event, really". One of the "old men" he will face is South African legend Roland Schoemann. Swanepoel's had opportunities to talk with his former countryman at other meets and likes what he hears.

"He's a nice guy. He's all about the business. Just getting out there and doing the business."

It's what Swanepoel hopes to do himself.

New Zealand swim coach Jan Cameron believes he can, and thinks all her squad can make a real impact on these Games.

She's got a medal target in her head but it's not something she's willing to share, cautioning that no member of this squad has won a medal of any description for New Zealand at a Commonwealth or Olympic Games.

Only Zoe Baker has won - gold in the 50m breaststroke at Manchester - but that was for England.

"You'd have to say there are expectations on her," Cameron said. "We expect she'll get up and win.

"But really we're just concentrating on individuals and what we can do to make them faster.

"We can't control medals because we can't control what other people do but we can control ourselves.

"If we swim to our potential then we'll get medals, make finals, swim personal bests."

Montreal heightened anticipation, Cameron believed, with New Zealand ranked in the top eight in the world across 12 events now. But she said it was still a young team.

"You look at Australia and they've got guys like Michael Klim swimming who's 28. They're such mature men, mature swimmers. But we're a [up and] coming team."

- HERALD ON SUNDAY